An encounter can be memorable without being understood. Something may happen to a mind while leaving its significance uncertain. Experiential learning begins with the question of what it means to learn through such encounters.
For Eudira, experience is an important subject within the study of intelligence. Its significance includes the difference between being present in a situation, having information about it and understanding what it means.
The significance of an encounter
An experience takes place in particular circumstances. Its meaning can involve purposes, relationships and details that a brief description leaves unexpressed. A complete list of events would not necessarily settle what was important about them.
This gives experience an intellectual richness that deserves careful language. Encountering more of the world and understanding it more deeply are different possibilities. The value of experience cannot be assumed from its quantity alone.
What counts as learning?
Learning suggests that something has been gained, yet the nature of that gain requires explanation. It might concern knowledge, skill or a more adequate appreciation of a difficult subject. Those possibilities give the word a breadth that a single measure may fail to capture.
A mistaken conclusion can also feel like a discovery. Taking experience seriously therefore includes care about the claims made on its behalf. The fact that something was encountered does not settle what it gives a mind reason to believe.
Learning through living
Our enquiry concerns the meaning and value of learning through participation in the world. It includes what distinguishes an informative encounter from a well-understood one.
The ambition is to take experience seriously as a subject of research, with attention to the depth of understanding that the word learning ought to express.